SharePoint 2010 missing Alert Me

Was at UTS teaching SharePoint when an interesting problem striked. The students couldn't see Alert Me on their ribbon bar.

My initial thought was that the ribbon was too cramped and the bell icon must be obscured. But after brief experimentation it was clear that the ribbon bar is pretty advanced and immune to that sort of defect. It must be somehing else.

Turned out that the issue was actually that the SharePoint standalone installation on their image did not have an out going mail server configured, so SharePoint correctly assumed that the user won't be sending out any emails. And thus, hid all the mail related functions.

What was surprising was tha I had assumed inSharePoint 2010 if an option wasn't available it was supposed to grey out, instead of just disappearing. A disabled alert me button with an warning message that "this SharePoint farm is unable to send Outgoing Emails" would have been fantastic